Any tricks for replacing hyd hoses on articulated machines at the swivel joint?

I just replaced a smaller diameter (1/4") hydraulic hose on my Barko 937. Of course it happens at the furthest point back on this job, over 2 miles away from the closest point that I can 4x4 my service truck into! It was the LS line going from the front section valve body to the pump demand control block in the rear. As manufactured, ALL smaller diameter hoses going from the front to rear sections are encased in a heavy, woven nylon sleeve to prevent chafing and abrasion. The problem I've found is that these sleeves have filled with thousands of hours of fine dust/debris that tightly encases the hoses within. And the sleeves tend to wad up into an accordian shape, creating and even tighter bind on the hoses. Aside from removing the entire multi-hose assembly and cleaning out the debris, I don't see any easy way to repair this situation. Removing a damaged hose is very difficult and installation of a new hose is on the impossible side of the spectrum, even with one of my custom built hose pulling cones. The fabric sleeve just wads up and won't allow passage of a replacement hose.

Any better methods of replacement other than single routing the new hose? I'm open to suggestions!

Before installing the new hose as a stand alone, I remove the old one to make more room in the pass through holes. I have to use a long tapered punch with hand pressure to make enough room for the new hose to slide into next to the existing hoses/sleeves. I encase the new hose with a tight layer of plastic spiral wrap to prevent abrasive wear and make installation a little bit slicker. Once I've repositioned enough of the existing hoses about with the large punch, I can make the install of the new hose with relative ease. I just wish that I had monkey arms or that Barko's engineers had a bit more forethought in their machine's maintenance design features. This "simple" repair took wayyyy too long to get accomplished.

I'm mostly just glad it's you and not me working on that beast. . .

Nice looking job.

Barko engineers Forethought? thanks, I haven’t laughed that hard in a while.

I've heard of guys using a fitting and hooking the new hose to the old one, and pulling it through that way, but I don't think that would go through your woven cover.

And better hope the hose doesn't have a 90 on the fitting. Plus I always need the old one for length to make the new one.

I've welded a washer to a plug and put the plug into the hose to pull the hose through with a rope.

1. Take a rope and use it to measure an easier route to run the hose.

2. take to town and get hose made.

3. Sawsall off the old hose in easy place, unscrew hose connections. Leave body of hose in machine.

4. Install new hose with zip ties and old radiator hose for wear spots.

I'm kidding, but I'm serious.

I don't know of any good way around that, either do what it seems that you did; wrap the hose real good with spiral wrap and single route it, or spend two days tearing the whole bundle out and re working it.

Another possibility would be to cut the mesh sleeve completely off the bundle. Run the new hose where it belongs. Rebundle with spiral wrapping and zip ties.

I have cut the damaged end off a hose and added a field splice to avoid removing the hose a couple of times.

I'd cut the sleeve off. Then you could also inspect the other hoses. You could put the plastic spiral protector on individual hoses or maybe get some big enough to wrap all the hoses together. Another option is to buy hose with extra abrasion resistance or put the mesh sleeve on the hose before installing.

Thanks for all of the suggestions. The one thing I have to point out is that the original hose must be removed in order to have enough room for the new hose to run in, even if the new hose does not go through the fabric sleeve. The space allowed to run the lines is that tight, that's why I had to use a large tapered punch to move the existing lines about enough to make room for the new hose as a stand-alone run.

The only other idea that I've got is to run a sewer jetter nozzle down the sleeve after the damaged hose is removed. This should back flush most of the dust/debris out of the sleeve. Of course this is only possible if I have the service truck at the machine location (pressure washer runs off of truck's pto) or if the machine is at the shop, not 2 miles out in the woods like it was this time. I was just thankful that the ticks have not woken up yet. This job is on the world's largest tick farm.

If you have not seen the jetting nozzles, this is what they look like:


They have more outlets out the back than towards the front so they self feed forward and blast the debris out the rear. I purchased a set of these to help keep my machine bellies cleaned out where I can not get the conventional pressure washer to spray into. Mostly under oil pans and hyd pumps. They seem to work pretty well and have a significant amount of forward pressure to feed easily.

Ideally, if I have time and ambition, I should pull & inspect all of the lines that run within the joint. Remove the fabric condoms and wrap all of the lines with spiral wrap. The cost of the spiral wrap is a whole lot less than the cost of the downtime. The spiral wrap is slick and allows near friction free movement between hoses as the machine operates. And, that would give me a chance to inspect all of the other hosee. Hellen Keller was working to assemble this machine by the looks of the hose routing.

One other note, I always use MuleTape to pull my new lines in, usually with a custom machined cone leader for difficult pulls. If you have never seen it, get some MT from an underground utilities contractor. It will hold a knot but is always easy to untie and the smallest 1/4" or 3/8" wide that I have in stock is rated for 1200 lb pull strength. It's very slick and has little friction but great pulling strength. It is what they use to pull underground utilities through plastic conduit. Some contractors will only pull with it one time and then discard it as the cost of failure is too high for their operations. I've also scored some from a friend who works at the telephone company - he will rescue partial reels out of the dumpster for me!

I use these.

Better known as the chinese finger trap lol

I keep 3 different sizes on the truck. The wire makes great scrapers pulling through mesh looms........and the harder you pull, the tighter the grip on the hose. Worth its weight in gold on those type of jobs. You can get at any electrical supply store.

Vetech63 said:

I use these.

Better known as the chinese finger trap lol

I keep 3 different sizes on the truck. The wire makes great scrapers pulling through mesh looms........and the harder you pull, the tighter the grip on the hose. Worth its weight in gold on those type of jobs. You can get at any electrical supply store.

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I could put a cone leader on that with ease! I saw some at the Ditch Witch store but their stuff was too big. I'll check with the electrical house. Thanks!

Love my mule tape, towed my truck with it once. lol

Vetech63 said:

I use these.

Better known as the chinese finger trap lol

I keep 3 different sizes on the truck. The wire makes great scrapers pulling through mesh looms........and the harder you pull, the tighter the grip on the hose. Worth its weight in gold on those type of jobs. You can get at any electrical supply store.

Click to expand...

I've seen them double ended and called a snake to fish wire rope through sheaves

That might be what they use when replacing drag cables on draglines. I read it is a real pain to replace the wire rope after it breaks. It's best if they catch the cable a couple weeks before it breaks. Then they can hook the new cable to the old cable to pull it on the drum. It would be interesting to see how they replaced the 5" wire rope on Big Muskie. The reels were 11' dia. but the rope was over 42lbs. a foot. Just getting the clamps on on the reel must have been pretty fun.

Yeah on pulling units and drill rigs. The smaller line at 5/8" is 1 lb/ft so I imagine that's quite a load

I don't know if it was mentioned before.

I pulled out the old with a piece of the heavy plastic bailer twine on it, leaving the twine in place of the old hose.

I then bought a plug fitting for the new hose, and drilled & tapped the end for a 1/4-20 eye bolt.
Tied it to the baler twine in place, and pulled it in.

The "mesh" if it is what I have on my machinery, is known as "Fire Sleeving".
It's purpose is to change a fine mist burst, to a sloppy dribble.

If you replace it with spiral sleeving, it's not the same thing.

FWIW I re-attached the fire sleeving on the new hose before I threaded it thru the machinery.

The sleeves can be a negative too. They can contain a leak and make it incredibly hard to find. They can also get full of dirt. As far as abrasion resistance the spiral wrap is just as effective, sometimes a better choice.

Double post. Site is acting up

Welder Dave said:

The sleeves can be a negative too. They can contain a leak and make it incredibly hard to find. They can also get full of dirt. As far as abrasion resistance the spiral wrap is just as effective, sometimes a better choice.

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I don't understand why it matters exactly where the leak is, it's in that piece of hose.
It's in the hose, you don't apply a patch.
When you dig it all out, then you can see where the leak was, measure off the machine to find what rubbed if anything.

fire sleeving is to keep you from burning up in a fireball.
It's not for abrasion.

I keep fire sleeve and spiral wrap in stock. I prefer the slickness of the spiral wrap as well as its hardened protective qualities over the fire sleeve. Fire sleeve does its job to contain a spraying leak so I use it in certain applications, sometimes using both types of overlay together to ensure a longer lasting repair or preventing what I know is a bad contact situation.

The major problem with the fire sleeve is the dust that can pack up within it, rendering a simple repair of a single hose re-run through the sleeve impossible out in the field if more than one hose is within that sleeve. That is why I started this thread, to see if anyone knew of a better approach to change out a single hose run through a bundle of multiple lines within a sleeve. Due to the amount of dust packing within the sleeves, it is near impossible to change out a single line without damaging either the sleeve, an existing line or the new line UNLESS I remove the entire hose assembly from the machine and clean out the dust. The accordian effect of the sleeve just makes installation of a new line that much more difficult. When deep in the field with no access to my truck and pressure washer, running a single line is the only option. And, the allowed space to run lines through means that the old line MUST be removed in order to make enough room for the replacement line. It's a tight fit through the routing holes.

My machine runs through some extremely dusty operating conditions. That's what packs up the fire sleeve - the very fine dust over thousands of hours. It's not uncommon to have the air filter alarm go off more than once a day in dusty conditions. I stir up a lot more dust that most other operations when the conditions are right. Those days that I can't see the cutterhead more than 50% of the time really suck.